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Ken Livingstone has lied before and has failed to deliver his promises. He is also a massive hypocrite for using tax avoidance measures himself. Yes, he has promised to drop train fares, but under his last term council tax went up 40%.

This does not have to be a Boris vs Ken everytime. Let us just look at Ken and whether he is a worthy candidate. There is substantial evidence to suggest he isn’t.

When even your former employees are noticing it – isn’t it time the Evening Standard gave the Mayoral contenders fair coverage?

Well, that’s £181m worth of pledges, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask where the money for that is going to come from. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty much the duty of any report on a new spending pledge to ask how it will be funded.

And I’m not sure that this

“My financial strategy I will not be revealing…On the morning after the election, I’ll let you know.”

But what that is doing is voting for Ken simply because he is the Labour candidate, not because he is necessarily the best candidate. Its a type of defensive voting and it is awful for the actual success of the area.

there is no such thing as a balanced and fair media. Id rather the newspapers come out and tell us who they support rather then hide behind the fair and balanced doctrine. Pretending to respect both leaders to their face and slagging the one they dislike behind their back is even worser then prasing both because at least then you know where they stand.

How on Earth is comparing the two candidates ‘voting for Ken because he is a Labour candidate’? It is presumably choosing which of the two candidates in the race is likely to be best – and that is undisputably Ken.

So if I should see biased coverage against Mr Johnson, would you highlight that as well, or is this an inherently biased review of bias?

Incidentally, I somehow doubt that complaints of bias against Mr Livingstone from a Mr Livingstone-supporting (or presumed to be so – Sunny has not declared an editorial policy here) website will be taken seriously outside of the converted – and complaining of media bias to the electorate at large will not win votes.

Either media outlets should be allowed to support particular candidates/parties/policies or they shouldn’t. It’s no good bleating about a media outlet supporting one when other outlets might support another. Anyway, isn’t it part of the value of the media to pick holes in political and economic arguments?

“But what that is doing is voting for Ken simply because he is the Labour candidate, not because he is necessarily the best candidate. Its a type of defensive voting and it is awful for the actual success of the area.”

How on earth did you come to that conclusion? My point is that dismissing Ken as an “unworthy” candidate without considering Boris is invalid, because you’re choosing between the two. It’s not a question of “Is Ken a good candidate?”, it’s a question of “Is Ken a better candidate than Boris?” Getting that right is OBVIOUSLY good for the area. Only asking half the question opens you up to making mistakes due to lack of data.

there is no such thing as a balanced and fair media. Id rather the newspapers come out and tell us who they support rather then hide behind the fair and balanced doctrine. Pretending to respect both leaders to their face and slagging the one they dislike behind their back is even worser then prasing both because at least then you know where they stand.

I don’t think the Evening Standard has ever attempted to mislead readers about the candidate the paper supports…

I’d like to hear more about the other candidates, though. I think I have seen the equivalent of one paragraph and a small photo.

Well, he was a student at the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, and then a reasonably high-ranking officer in the KGB so I don’t think his right-wing credentials are entirely spotless. I can’t answer to his rabid dick-ishness

@7 Do you think the fact that his unfunded election-time bribery… er, sorry, funding pledges – are unaffordable shouldn’t be raised at all?

And as for “It is presumably choosing which of the two candidates in the race is likely to be best – and that is undisputably Ken.” – er, NO. You can take the vile, divisive, pigeon-holing, Islamist-cosying old hack and shove him.

The Evening Standard has a near monopolistic control over London’s commuters. And yet rather than using this position responsibility, it wants to exploit it again.

So how to translate this from Leftist-speak to normal English? A newspaper appeals to their audience rather well, which none of the Left Wing papers do, and they have an editorial opinion the Left does not like, so they should be banned from doing so.

The Evening Standard does not have anything like monopolistic control. Of all the choices before consumers, a huge number of them prefer the Evening Standard.

Totally automatic running of the Tube with no on-board (and unionised) staff is Fantasy Island stuff. But the Standard is happy to run stories about it.

Why is it Fantasy Island stuff? Given that three London Underground lines already use it and only keep the “driver” because it makes passengers feel secure. Given that it is already used on underground line from Paris to Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong and Vancouver? It is pretty embarrassing when New Delhi is willing to embrace this technology and the British are not.

The drivers on the Underground get paid about £60,000 a year to push a button. They no longer “drive” the train.

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And there we have it! Two back-to-back articles highlighting Sunny’s double standards and general hypocrisy.

First you have Sunnby defending a guy attacking Exeter College for hosting Christian Concern by saying he has a democratic right and freedom of speach – convieniently forgetting Exeter and Christian concerns rights to the same.

Then, in the very next article he attacks the evening standard because they are excercising their right to free speach by supporting Boris, and calling Ken out on his promises (more accurately – lies – it’s not like ‘en doesn’t have form).

Clearly in Sunny’s world some animals are more equal than others. In the first case he is actively trying to suppress one groups right to free speach by denying them a platform to do so, and in the other he is complaining that free speach is somehow unfairly biased.

What of course he really wants is to squash any dissenting or opposing opinion to his own groups views. It’s the typical Fabian view – an elite controlling for the masses – and it’s the complete antihises of being a liberal. It’s authoritarian, and the attacks he and his kind make on opposing views borders on totalitarian.

Not a voting Londoner – I am a commuter and this paper litters my train home.

The way to chart how well the Evening Standard’s un-favoured candidate is doing, as the election approaches, is to watch for the appearance of a paragraph of closely typed small print appearing below political ‘news’ stories. This is the ‘balancing factoid’ and it will present a fair analysis of the position covered in the main piece.

At the last election, they did this under most of their partisan pieces – just in case they won and to allow them to claim they were fair so that if the candidate won, they would not cut them out of the loop.

Big question of the day – Why does the ES need an editorial column? They could call it the balance column and use it for the small paragraphs and leave the rest of the space free for its biased news coverage and still claim to be a quality paper because there will be somewhere for readers to get the basic facts…

I like the I newspaper but as it is in the same stable as this ‘quality’ newpaper, I worry about subliminal messaging when I read it. “Chris Blackhurst” former city guy for the ES as editor of the ‘Independent’ makes me worry about that paper’s long term direction.

The Evening Standard does not have anything like monopolistic control. Of all the choices before consumers, a huge number of them prefer the Evening Standard.

“All the choices”? Please, point me to all those untouched stacks of other free London newspapers, I must have missed them.

The closest thing I can see to a competitor is the Metro, which is a national so doesn’t give much coverage to the mayoral race, and owned by Associated Newspapers so hardly likely to back anyone but a Tory in any case. If you want a London paper you have no choice but to pick up a Standard and expose yourself to whichever bias they feel like stuffing into it.

If you want a London paper you have no choice but to pick up a Standard and expose yourself to whichever bias they feel like stuffing into it.

So no, you don’t get it. What you mean is not that the ES has a monopoly, but if you want a free newspaper with lots of coverage of London, handed to you for nothing on the Train platform, then you’re kind of stuck with the ES.

Big deal.

If you don’t want to read the ES you could actually pay for a newspaper. It does not have a monopoly. It just has a strange business model.

Maybe we should have a “LC Watch” campaign as well, to report when LC publishes pieces of biased journalism.

Sunny, are you seriously saying it is not acceptable for a privately run newspaper to come out in favour of one candidate, but it is perfectly acceptable for your website to be as biased and one-sided as it likes?

“Maybe we should have a “LC Watch” campaign as well, to report when LC publishes pieces of biased journalism.”

It’s called “the comment sections on LC”.

More to the point, LC is a confessedly left-wing blog that exists to support left-wing agendas. The ES is a newspaper. I’m not condemning the latter for openly coming out against Ken, but I don’t think the two organs are really comparable.

I occasionally commute into London, and there is a freesheet called “Metro” five days a week. There are also lots of copies of paid-for newspapers (too frequently “The Sun”, but also Mirror, Times, FT, Independent, Mail…)
Either Sunny does not get up in the morning or he does not know the meaning of the word “Monopoly”.